The CPAN Testers project captures and analyzes detailed results from building and testing CPAN distributions on multiple operating systems and multiple versions of Perl. This provides valuable feedback to module authors and potential users to identify bugs or platform compatibility issues and improves the overall quality and value of CPAN.

One way individuals can contribute is to send a report for each module that they test or install. CPAN::Reporter is an add-on for the CPAN.pm module to send the results of building and testing modules to the CPAN Testers project. Full support for CPAN::Reporter is available in CPAN.pm as of version 1.92.

CPAN::Reporter sends test reports to a server known as the Metabase. This requires an active Internet connection and a profile file. To create the profile, users will need to run metabase-profile from a terminal window and fill the information at the prompts. This will create a file called metabase_id.json in the current directory. That file should be moved to the .cpanreporter directory inside the user's home directory.

Users with an existing metabase profile file (e.g. from another machine), should copy it into the .cpanreporter directory instead of creating a new one. Profile files may be located outside the .cpanreporter directory by following instructions in CPAN::Reporter::Config.

unknown -- distribution failed to build, had no test suite or outcome was inconclusive

na --- distribution is not applicable to this platform and/or version of Perl

In returning results of the test suite to CPAN.pm, "pass" and "unknown" are considered successful attempts to "make test" or "Build test" and will not prevent installation. "fail" and "na" are considered to be failures and CPAN.pm will not install unless forced.

An error from Makefile.PL/Build.PL or make/Build will also be graded as "unknown" and a failure will be signaled to CPAN.pm.

If prerequisites specified in Makefile.PL or Build.PL are not available, no report will be generated and a failure will be signaled to CPAN.pm.

CPAN::Reporter includes information in the test report about environment variables and special Perl variables that could be affecting test results in order to help module authors interpret the results of the tests. This includes information about paths, terminal, locale, user/group ID, installed toolchain modules (e.g. ExtUtils::MakeMaker) and so on.

These have been intentionally limited to items that should not cause harmful personal information to be revealed -- it does not include your entire environment. Nevertheless, please do not use CPAN::Reporter if you are concerned about the disclosure of this information as part of your test report.

Users wishing to review this information may choose to edit the report prior to sending it.